New Seattle Mag Shows Promise in Second Issue

Isthmus, a Seattle literary magazine edited by Ann Przyzycki and Randy DeVita, does a respectable job for this only being its second issue. The typeface and font size make for a comfortable read, and the only artwork – a cover photo by Andrea Krause called “Stairs, City Museum” – is gorgeous. The contents themselves manage to be interesting if not necessarily remarkable. This is in no way meant to denigrate the contributors, all of them heavy hitters as profiled in the back of the magazine. After all, there is much to be said for “interesting.”

Fiction

Ray Morrison's “For You” is an epistolary story chronicling a female fan's letters to Bruce Springsteen. These are quite funny, and the reader can only imagine what the reactions at the other end must be. But if there's a problem here at all, it's that Morrison seems to be patronizing his character. Maranda's overall immaturity – especially for her age (she would sound more believable in letters from Salinger's Franny Glass to Lane Coutell) – feels slathered on, and it's easy to imagine the author laughing at, not with, her. (A minor point: The generic telephone prefix “555” works only a little better in movies than it does on the printed page. I wish Morrison had thought of some way to work around that; it detracts from the story's verisimilitude.)

Other fiction: In her dystopian tale “The Beekeeper,” Helen Phillips peels back the layers of her story one small revelation at a time, and even then, the central relationship remains elusive and tantalizing (the first-person narrator's phrase “unborn words” wonderfully apt). Heather A. Slomski's “A Fulfilling Life” ended before I wanted it to, definitely a good sign. One wonders whether Mac, trying to get his second novel off the ground, will ever realize the most interesting story was right under his nose the whole time. Andrew Ladd's “Pia” feels lived in, as though life went on before the story started and will continue after we close the cover. To me, John Cheever best exemplified this expansiveness. (I also like Ladd's phrase “bone china smile.”)

Nonfiction

This is the strongest category in the issue, with just three entries. Anna Redsand's “A Good Stranger” is a personal exploration of two cultures and her quest for, as she puts it at various points, “a struggle for selfhood” and a sense of “belonging.” That sense of needing to belong to something larger than herself gives Redsand the impetus to look beyond her Navajo roots and toward Judaism. She has already begun “defining my religious identity” when, in her sophomore year of college, she lives with a Jewish family and finds herself drawn to their beliefs and rituals. She begins to assimilate. Her fear that she will never belong gives her the chutzpah to embark on what eventually becomes her conversion. It's a fascinating journey Redsand takes us on, and it's the best piece overall.

Other nonfiction: Sarah Robinson really gets us thinking about the houses we've lived in and the meaning they impart. In “The House is the Mother's Body,” Robinson's search for bliss (precipitated by Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell's discussions on the topic) takes her back in memory to the places she grew up in, the bedroom and the fort and even the dollhouse she made. She eventually becomes an architect, one who considers herself a therapist as well by helping others “build the dream” of home. (I especially like her description of a ceiling “with its scattered glitter glistening between gypsum lumps.”) In “Double Infinity,” M Dressler explores the connection between the rings you tie yourself into before rock climbing and wedding rings, in this case her husband's and her mother-in-law's. The final climbing ring is looped into a figure eight, the shape of eternity. The comparisons here are obvious and easy to draw, perhaps too easy. She does craft a lovely, enviable sentence not far from the end: “I hop onto the wall before my heart starts beating like a bent fan in my ribcage.”

Poetry

Of the 11 poems included here, all of them fine, two stand out for special mention.

Alyse Bensel has found an interesting subject in Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717), a noted entymologist and scientific illustrator. “Pomegranate Tree, Split Fruit and Painted Lady, 1665” celebrates not so much Merian's finished painting as it does the effort put into it. The first verse is about the flaws, the “failure,” of Merian's first attempt. “Segmented branches lack / depth,” the “unripe globes” of fruit lack proportion, and overall she finds “the color too / thickly applied.” The second verse focuses on her solution: “to trick / the eye into belief” (verse 1) by rendering details “as close / to life as she could / touch” (verse 2). She has not created a perfect work, but has found a way to “cover imperfections,” which means to go back, to persevere, and emerge triumphant. This brief, perfectly balanced poem is a tribute to artistic struggle.

So many poems benefit from the beauty of juxtaposition, none more so than in Alec Hershman's “Permanent and Wonderful Storage” (a wonderful title). His setting is a library, evidently a large, imposing place judging by “the dust of cathedral windows” and the title itself. The speaker's “tilt of lassitude,” brought on by the words he's reading or perhaps “the plastic texture of their binding,” allows his mind to drift and to make a seemingly random connection. The pages, “like a rag / stuffed in a mouth,” remind him of his hunger in “this waterless space.” When he “closes his eyes” upon hearing “the heat lift in the pipes,” he imagines a waiter in a “posh” restaurant “fetching a lobster / from a tank near the bar.” Hershman, like any good writer, forces us to earn our appreciation by making our own connections between the two settings, real and imagined. Had he done all the work for us, the poem would have no impact. In the last few lines, this “waterless space” becomes just the opposite, and a lovely final image is ours for the understanding: